How might cultural mores influence diary writing?
Since the mid-nineteenth century, many diarists have witnessed and recorded stages in the evolution of cultural norms, expectations, and opportunities for girls and women. Many diaries have served as “staging areas” from which diarists can question as well as conform to gender roles. For instance, in her diary, which she kept from 1876 to1880, Blanche Brackenridge, an adolescent from Rochester, Minnesota, listed what she called “Knife and Fork Flirtations” in a playful yet subversive look at “ladylike” behavior. Like Blanche Brackenridge, many diarists in this anthology used their diaries to acquiesce to and rebel against such culture-bound notions as the “doctrine of separate spheres” and the “cult of true womanhood,” which scholars now acknowledge are complicated by issues of race, class, sexuality, age, region, religion, and other variables. Carol Coburn and Martha Smith, authors of Spirited Lives, explain that the doctrine of “separate spheres” and the “cult of domesticity” were cu
